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DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Harvey Pekar is one cantankerous schlub. He has a dead-end job as a
medical records file clerk that he tolerates just well enough that he's
never tried to find anything more fulfilling. He lives in a dark,
cramped hole of a Cleveland bachelor pad (though he's been married
multiple times) that looks like it's channeling a design style partway
between crack den and used record store. His best friend at work is
weirdo and self-proclaimed "world-class nerd" Toby Radloff, a
guy who genuinely thinks Revenge of the Nerds is a work of
cinematic genius. And when he's not spending his free time obsessively
collecting records and expressing his bitterness at the world, Harvey
also happens to be the writer-creator of an underground comic book
sensation, American Splendor. Based on the very ordinary escapades of
his utterly ordinary life, the writing comes out of Harvey's own
experiences, with the drawing supplied by a host of Harvey's comic
artist friends. Most famous of them is Robert Crumb, who shares Harvey's
passion for old records, and is the first to encourage Harvey into
believing that his humdrum life makes for truly extraordinary comic book
fare. In Harvey's world, art and life are one and the same; through his
comic, he even meets his third wife and unlikely soulmate, an eccentric
comic book store owner named Joyce. As American Splendor reaches a sort
of cult status, Harvey and Joyce find themselves coping with Harvey's
quasi-celebrity status, along with more mundane difficulties of
marriage, family, and a struggle with cancer.
Review
Comic book movie adaptations are all the rage these days, but it's fair
to say that American Splendor stands way, way out from all the
rest. For one thing, the movie tells the story in a very unusual, deeply
meta- sort of way. Like the comic book, the movie blurs the lines
between real life and art. There are the fictional live-action portions,
interspersed with documentary-style talking heads and old TV footage,
complemented by comic book-style animated sequences. For another thing,
Harvey Pekar is not your typical comic book hero. He's bald, he's
funny-looking, he's deeply disgruntled, he's sort of a lech. And oh
yeah, he's a real person, with all the complications and contradictions
that that implies. A movie like this couldn't work unless we absolutely
believed that the actor playing Harvey Pekar really was Harvey Pekar;
fortunately, Paul Giamatti is so perfect in the role that when the real
Harvey periodically shows up on screen, you have little problem
believing that these two men are one and the same person. (The same is
true of the other people in Harvey's life: Hope Davis especially, ever
the chameleon, absolutely unequivocally is Harvey's wife Joyce Pekar,
from the black wig and glasses to the distinctive mannerisms.)
Ultimately, what makes American Splendor work isn't the
cleverness of the film's construction, but Harvey himself. He makes
ordinariness seem utterly fascinating; he's simultaneously pathetic and
kind of admirable. Even as he finds a certain level of fame, first with
the comic book and then with a stint on the Letterman show in the
80s, Harvey doggedly plods on with his boring job and continues to live
in his shack of a home. There's no attempt to work towards something
"better," the way we're usually encouraged to do in American
culture. Harvey is what he is, and he makes no apologies for it. And in
this more-money-better-cars-bigger-houses society in which we live,
there's something kind of beautiful about that. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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